Writing contents of a class to a file

Question

I have a class, all string properties like this:

public class MyClass 
{
  public string Name {get;set;}
  public string Phone {get;set;}
  // a bunch of more fields....
{

And a list of that class List<MyClass> myListOfObjects; that I have populated it through out the program with values.

And then I have a file (csv) with headers:

Name, Phone, etc...

I want to write the contents of that myListOfObjects into that file. I was thinking just loop through them and write one row per object. But wanted to see is there a better nicer way?

you could override `ToString()` for your class to make it easier, but looping through and writing per object is pretty much it. — DrewJordan, Dec 11 '15 at 18:50
Did you want to write all properties to a file, or just a select few? — Daniel Gimenez, Dec 11 '15 at 18:51
Have you [read this](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18757097/writing-data-into-csv-file)? — Yuval Itzchakov, Dec 11 '15 at 18:54
@Bohn: If you'll be in Lambeau Sunday, paint "Bohn" on your cheesehead and I'll look for you (on tv). — B. Clay Shannon-B. Crow Raven, Dec 11 '15 at 18:55

Arghya C · Answer 1 · 2015-12-11T19:01:28.117

2

You can write all your data in one shot, like

var list = new List<MyClass>();
var fileData = list.Select(row => string.Join(",", row.Name, row.Phone, row.Etc)).ToArray();

File.WriteAllLines(@"C:\YourFile", fileData);

Note: This is one way to improve the file write, but it doesn't handle un-escaped text data like Name with comma.

edited Dec 11 '15 at 19:01

answered Dec 11 '15 at 18:53

Arghya C

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Not really a good solution, though could be if you also handle text qualifiers and string escaping. This will fail if there is a common in Name for example. – Daniel Gimenez Dec 11 '15 at 18:56
@DanielGimenez that's true. From the question it seems like he has already handled that, and he is looking for a "better" way than looping through each object and write to file for each. This was just to give a hint towards improving that, not handling un-escaped text data. – Arghya C Dec 11 '15 at 18:59

Writing contents of a class to a file

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